Abner Jordan (95 years old), Shares His Life As An Enslaved Black Person On The Stagville Plantation In Durham, North Carolina.
This is a WPA Ex-Slave Oral Narrative 1936-1938
Library Of Congress-North Carolina Narratives, Volume XI, Part 2
Abner Jordan, ex-slave of Durham County.
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Posted on March 24, 2015 by durhambeginnings
You will see Abner Jordan Quotes, then under his quotes are Supporting Documents.

“Marse Paul had heap if niggahs; he had five thousan’…When he meet dem in de road he wouldn’ know dem an’ when he ased dem who dey wus an’ who dey belonged to”
Bennehan-Cameron plantation records show that the family owned closer to 1000 slaves not the 5000 that Abner states, but the family remains one of North Carolina’s largest slave owners and one of the largest plantations in the American South.
The WPA narrative of Doc Edwards, a former slave of the Cameron plantation, also recounts how Paul Cameron owned so many slaves that often times he did not know if they belonged to him and would have to ask if they were his.

“I belonged to Marse Paul…My pappy’s name wus Obed an’ my mammy wus Ella Jordan an’ dey wus thirteen chillun on our family.”

The Camerons kept lists of slave children born on their plantations. These slave records of family units kept by the Bennehan-Camerons show that Abner Jordan’s mother, Ella/Ellen, was born into slavery to her mother, Judy, and father, Abner, on the Stagville plantation. The records also show that Abner’s father, Obed/Ovid, was bought by Thomas Bennehan, Paul Cameron’s predecessor. Another slave record of family units (1857) lists Abner Jordan as the son of Ovid and Ellen bringing the total to 10 children in his family on record at that time.

“I wus de same age of Young Marse Benehan” Bennehan Cameron was born in 1854." Although Abner states he was born in 1832 making him 105 years old at the time of the WPA interview, the Ninth Census, 1870 lists Abner as 15 years old when the census was taken. This supports his statement that he was the same age as Bennehan because it places Abner’s year of birth at around 1854 or 1855, the same as Bennehan’s. Also the plantation’s slave records do not include Abner until the late 1850s.

“Dey [slaves] couldn’ leave de plantation without Marse say dey could.”
The North Carolina slave laws stated that slaves could not leave the plantation without the written permission of their owner or overseer.

“When de war come de Yankees come to de house an’ axed my mammy whare de folks done hid de silver an’ gol’, an’ dey say dey gwine to kill mammy if she didn’ tell dem. But mammy say she didn’ know whare dey put it, an’ dey would jus’ have to kill her for she didn’ know an’ wouldn’ lie to keep dem from hurting her. De sojers stole seven or eight of de ho’ses an’ foun’ de meat an’ stole dat, but dey didn’ burn none off de buildin’s nor hurt any of us slaves.”

The WPA narrative of Cy Hart, an ex-slave of the Stagville Plantation, also recounts how Union soldiers came to the plantation looking for food but didn’t cause any harm to the slaves or destroy any of the buildings. However, according to Cy Hart, Confederate soldiers, who were looking for the silver and gold that Paul Cameron had hid, were the first to come to the plantation and were threatening to kill the slaves. These soldiers ran off when the Union soldiers arrived.

“My pappy an’ his family stayed wid Marse Paul five years after de surrender den we moved to Hillsboro”
Cy Hart recounts in her WPA interview that her family and other former slaves stayed with Paul Cameron after the Civil War.

In a letter from Paul Cameron to his sisters (1865), he speaks of “Uncle Ovid” and his family coming to the Burnside House in Hillsborough from Stagville to work after they had been freed by the war. Here he is referring to Ovid Jordan, Abner’s father. According to the Cameron plantation financial documents, Ovid was paid for his work there over the course of 16 months.

The Ninth Census, 1870 shows Ovid Jordan, listed as “Ovit Jordan” age 65, Ellen Jordan, 50 and six of their children as living in Mangum Township, NC.
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Abner Jordan was interviewed by a member of the Work Projects Administration for a Federal Writer’ Project that was documenting North Carolina slave narratives. Jordan has never left North Carolina since he was born there and agreed to the interview despite being the old age of 95. He discussed his birth with hesitance, claiming that he was “bawn about 1832 in Staggsville, Marse Cameron’s place”.

Jordan ‘belonged’ to Marse Paul and interestingly enough, lived in an overcrowded two-story slave house on the Staggsville Plantation along with his parents and 13 other brothers and sisters. When he was of age, Abner Jordan attempted to run away with his closest friend (Marse Benny) and enlist in the war, however his master went and brought him back scolding him for “being too young to go and fight de Yankees”. Paul Cameron owned more than nine hundred slaves and he spread them out along his thirty thousand acre plantation.

It was established in 1787 by the Bennehan and Cameron families, Stagville was the largest plantation in North Carolina. Abner Jordan said Paul Cameron owned so many slaves that, “when he meet dem in the road he wouldn’t know dem and when he ased dem who dey belonged to, dey’ tell him dey belonged to Marse Paul Cameron and he would say dat wus all right and from dem to go right on along”. Jordan’s father was a blacksmith who was also in charge of blowing the horn for the other slaves to come in from the fields at night.

He noted that slaves were forbidden to leave the fields without Marse Cameron telling them they could, and only then could they go to their respective parts on the plantation. When the Civil War reached Stagville, the plantation was seized but rather than being concerned with the slaves, Northern soldiers were instead only interested in provisions, horses, and where Cameron had hid his silver & gold. After the surrender, Jordan’s family was one of the few couplings of African Americans to remain with Paul Cameron, and they did so for around five years.

An exterior picture of the two-story slave house on the Stagville Plantation for which Abner Jordan lived in, offers an extra step into the life that Jordan was trying to humanize. Paul Cameron ordered the slave house to be built in the hopes that it would improve the health of those who had been living in poorly-constructed, leaky, dirt-floored cabins (which were very common on his plantation).

After all, slaves that were healthy and rested could produce much more for their masters than those who were malnourished. The house that Jordan lived in is the only surviving two-story slave house in North Carolina, it housed African Americans with a common family name and lineage, with a single family consisting of 5-7 individuals living in each other four rooms in the house. The Stagville plantation is located in parts of what are now Orange, Durham, Wake and Granville counties.
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Background About The WPA Interviews
During the Great Depression many government programs were made to create jobs for the large amounts of unemployed Americans. The Work Projects Administration, or WPA, was the largest of these projects. The WPA had the goal of using the many jobless in America to create many public works projects. Among these was the Federal Writers Project, or FWP, that sought to provide jobs for writers left unemployed by the Depression.

Among its many projects the FWP endeavored to record the experience of slavery in America. This project would be different than those before it though. The stories collected would be from the lives and views of the slaves themselves, rather than the viewpoints of whites. This gave Americans a new viewpoint of slavery from the inside, rather than as distant onlookers.

It was very important to gather these narratives as soon as possible, because many ex-slaves had never before shared their stories, and many were growing old, which meant that their tales might soon be lost forever. In order to gather these slave narratives programs were set up in 17 states to interview those who had lived under slavery and learn their stories.

Eventually, over 2000 interviews of former slaves were gathered. These became the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, which is a very important historical tool for seeing the experiences of slavery firsthand by those who lived it.
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